1) Incentives are not given up front. They are given proportional to the results Amazon has achieved. Amazon must make a report each year detailing their progress before any award is given. 2) The city-level incentives are available to any business. State-level incentives (I think 300m) are not. 3) Amazon has pledged to invest in the local community as part of the deal. There are plans for an elementary school and te…
Opportunity costs?
You list several benefits, but benefits don't tell us where a choice ranks in the list of possible alternatives.
For example, the alternative where we get all those benefits, but where there weren't any incentives at all, seems strictly better. Why not that?
You'd probably protest that it's not realistic. We can't get there in the current system, where powerful companies can play states and municipalities off of each other and require the best incentives before they are willing to make any useful choices.
But a lot of us think that system sucks.
When the powerful have opportunities to rewrite local policies on the fly, it doesn't feel right. Doesn't matter how many benefits there are.
This isn't a new or irrational ideal. Much of the Western canon on governance obsesses about the importance of the rule of law: the idea that the laws should apply to commoners and kings (or powerful companies) equally.
It's a principle a lot of people hold very dearly, and are unwilling to sacrifice for a few temporary benefits that we might have been able to achieve anyway, if we just had a better system in place in advance.